


The Iron Harvest

by aninchofdust



Category: Secret Garden - Norman/Simon, The Secret Garden - All Media Types, The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23841535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aninchofdust/pseuds/aninchofdust
Summary: Of the seven Sowerby boys, three came home.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19
Collections: Summer Solstice Swap





	The Iron Harvest

Of the seven Sowerby boys, three came home. Jem, the next oldest after Dickon, died at Le Cateau in the desperate retreat to the Marne. The shell that killed Willie on the first day of the Somme also took ‘Lizabeth Ellen’s young man and another friend they’d known from nappies; between them, there were just about enough remains to fill a sack. Phil lasted another four months before he died choking on gas, also at the Somme, and Art fell riddled with machine gun bullets at Passchendaele; his body hung on the wire for days before it disappeared into the miserable endless mud.

Ernie took a wound in the side at Arras that invalided him home. Ben, only just old enough to be conscripted when the armistice was declared, never left Britain at all.

Dickon came home without a scratch. Colin came home with one leg fewer than he’d left with and deep lines of pain carved into his face; and Mary came back over the desolate moor to Misselthwaite through the November darkness with the wind an endless wail, and could not remember spring.

## I. War, 1914-1917

Colin’s mother had said once—in a happier time—laughing—that if she ever took ill or went away Ben Weatherstaff was to take care of her roses, and so faithfully he had; but by the time Mary left Misselthwaite, there was no one left for her to ask. Ben was five years dead, and the gardening staff was down to Mr. Roach, the greying head gardener, and a handful of boys who could more or less weed and dig holes as directed but of a certainty could not be trusted to prune roses.

“I’ll take care of Colin,” she said to Mr. Craven in his study. “You look after the garden.”

“We will, child,” Mr. Craven said vaguely, smiling not at her but at something over her shoulder. “I promise.” And with that dubious assurance Mary had to content herself. 

The war had been going on for almost a year by then, and the proud old British regular army had more or less been wiped out, and the Germans had unleashed the fresh hell of gas at Second Ypres, and there were ghosts in the trenches.

Nineteen-year-old Phil had signed up in the first flush of patriotic fervor, and with him sixteen-year-old Willie, who hadn’t even had to stammer out his inadequately rehearsed lie before the mayor who had known him all his life winked and put him down as eighteen. By the end of the year there was an entire battalion—four of them, in fact—of East Yorkshire volunteers. 

The first telegram came to the little moorland cottage before they’d even left for training. It said, quite simply:

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU SERGEANT J.A. SOWERBY KILLED IN ACTION FRANCE AUGUST 26

Mary had hardly known Jem, who hadn’t Dickon’s patience for young creatures animal or human; he’d joined up as soon as he was old enough and spent time stationed in an assortment of locations around the empire, including some years in India, from which he sent brightly patterned scarves for his mother and exotic trinkets for his younger siblings.

The next day Dickon, who was as indifferent to the doings of nations as he was keenly attuned to living things, joined. T’ keep an eye on ‘is brothers, he said unsmiling when he came to Misselthwaite to tell Mary and give his notice to Mr. Craven, unfamiliar and handsome in his neat new khakis.

“Mother knowed it a fortnight ago,” he said to Mary before he left. “I didn’t want to believe it but a mother knows things.” He paused, his blue eyes unusually troubled, and then added, “I hope there’ll not be much more for her to know.”

Colin was back at Oxford by then, but he sent orders for flowers from Misselthwaite’s gardens to be delivered to the cottage, and less than a month later he stopped in there to pay his respects before continuing up the hill to the manor to tell his father that he, too, had joined up and would be off to training in five days.

Then he was gone. The secret garden was a miracle of fall roses but Mary couldn’t enjoy them; she paced restlessly through the gardens and through the halls, ringing Mrs. Medlock a dozen times a day to ask if the mail had come. She had never in her life had much use for reading, but now she pored over every newspaper she could get and could not help but note the recruitment ads—

She told herself she couldn’t leave Mr. Craven all alone again in that big empty house.

Half the undergardeners had enlisted too, leaving the grounds staff quite shorthanded; so Mr. Roach, who had become used to and even appreciative of the whims of the young master and miss, let Mary help with the kitchen gardens: collecting apples, cutting fall cabbages and digging up carrots and potatoes and turnips, pulling up declining plants after the first frost and putting the garden to bed except for the winter vegetables in their frames; and then winter arrived, and Mary didn’t have even the gardens to distract herself with.

Mr. Craven knew the war was on, he must; it could hardly be missed, and at any rate Colin had told him where he was going; but he never said a word about it, only stayed shut up in his study and smiled at the ghost he loved, and looked right through anyone else. Mrs. Medlock came to Mary on the rare occasions she required instructions; but that was only a matter of formality. She had managed the household for fifteen years and could do so quite well on her own.

“Goodbye,” Mary said out loud, standing in the doorway to the secret garden. A breath of wind went through the roses like a sigh: as if the garden remembered someone else who had gone and never come back, and was afraid she would do the same. “Goodbye,” she said again to that spirit, both joyful and sad, which dwelled in the garden, and locked the door behind her.

So she left Misselthwaite and took a train to the coast, and then a transport across the Channel while trying not to think of U-boats lurking beneath the water, and then another train, much less comfortable, and one more even less comfortable, the sum of which brought her to the camp behind the lines.

Her first sight of it was the cemetery spilling down the hill, the crooked rows of wooden crosses dimly seen through the dusk. It might’ve been a charming French town once, before it had been engulfed by the sprawling camp of the British army: the long hospital wards immediately next to the railway junction, wood-and-canvas shanties for the hospital staff and barracks for the soldiers, separate quarters for the officers, supply depots and communications posts and who knew what else.

The rumble of guns was always in the distance, more felt than heard, a constant unease in the air; the gently born volunteers were snobbish toward the professional nurses and the professional nurses scorned them back, and set Mary to scrubbing floors—if only Martha could see her now!—and washing instruments for weeks before they deigned to let her touch a patient; it rained until it felt as if the skies themselves were trying to wash them from the face of the earth and the entire camp was a sea of mud, over which finally duckboards were placed to walk on, and then the duckboards sank into the muck; Mary was never quite dry, always cold, slept too few hours and woke with her shoulders an iron knot of tension; and for all that it was better than staying at Misselthwaite in an agony of suspension. For all her faults she had never been squeamish; she learned quickly to attend to the most gruesome of wounds, to wounds gone septic which oozed pus and stank of rotting flesh, to the stumps of amputated limbs. 

There was one young soldier who had managed to take shrapnel in eight places without dying, but he was weak and feverish, breathing too fast, shivering painfully though his skin was shiny with sweat.

“Miss,” he said fretfully, broad Yorkshire in his voice, “when’ll I die?”

Automatically Mary said, “Tha’ munnot speak so,” and his young frightened face opened up. She sat with him that afternoon and talked of the moor in summer, th’ heather flowering’ all purple bells, an’ hundreds o’ butterflies flutterin’ an’ bees hummin’ an’ skylarks soarin’ up an’ singin’, and he closed his eyes and listened for a while and fell asleep. He died two days later.

There were Indian soldiers too, fighting under English officers a long way from home, and to some of them she sang snatches of the Hindi songs she still half-remembered her Ayah singing to her long ago; one of them taught her different words in Punjabi to several of them. And for others, who only wanted not to be alone, she would murmur to them of a distant green garden as she once had to Colin before he had dared to see it for himself.

Those were the easy times. The hard times came when the Germans made an attack, or worse, when the generals in their wisdom decided it was time for a push. Then the wounded men came streaming in, some shambling in grey-faced and holding their own guts in but most of them carried on stretchers until all the beds were full and the stretchers were pressed into service as beds, and then they were carried in by hand until all the stretchers were full as well and they were laid in the aisles until those were full and they were laid outside to either die or wait for some other poor fellow to die so they could have his place inside.  


Then the surgeons worked several days at a stretch and the nurses too, laboring over what in the delirium of exhaustion seemed no longer to be men but only heaps of bloody meat which sometimes groaned or screamed, until at last everything that could be done had been done and it remained only to see who would die and who would live to return to the front and who would be sent home crippled for life.

There were times that shone bright in her memory: some months after she arrived she received word from Colin that his company had finished its rotation in the front lines and was coming to the camp for resupply and reassignment, and he’d gotten leave to go home and see his father after.

He sprang lightly onto the platform and kissed her on the cheek, then leaned back to shout some friendly deprecation at someone still on the train. He was clean-shaven though his hair had gotten a little long; a little thinner but not so badly affected after all, Mary thought hopefully. That familiar peremptory air, which on him managed to be endearing rather than irritating, had transformed into command; he ordered about men five or ten years older than him with not the least hint of self-consciousness or uncertainty.

But when he had returned to the trenches and she wrote to him about her hard-won new knowledge, he began to reply in kind.

Colin had a great many thoughts on the construction of the ideal trench, on infantry and artillery tactics, on possible methods of dealing with rats, on the difficulty of commanding men to charge into what they all knew was near-certain death. He didn’t seem to like writing about his day-to-day doings, but one letter she received from him read:

_I’ve just finished writing letters home for another dozen men. I’ve gotten quite used to it—quite scientific about it, in fact. I write that he was brave, a credit to the company and beloved by all the men, and then I say he died quickly and without pain. Shot in the head, usually. Occasionally it’s even true._

_Not for poor Stephenson, though. We heard him calling out all night. I say calling out, but he was screaming piteously. Four men went out to try to get him—Burrage and Hadley first, and then Wilby, and then Gallagher. Brave bastards. And now I am writing letters for them too._

_I should have gone_ [scribbled out]()

_No one saw Markham fall, so I suppose he might still turn up at a clearing station. Or I might have yet another letter to write in a few days._

And then below this, cut deeply into the page:

_Was it for this I learned to walk?_

She didn’t know how to reply. Before she did, she received his next letter, which began with an awkward apology for the mood in which he’d written the last and was brisk and breezy thereafter.

Dickon wrote less; he was less inclined to letters and had more people among whom to spread his missives. At any rate they were invariably brief: he was still well, though he missed the food at home; his brothers were well; he’d found a jackal cub but had no place in the barracks to keep it.

They’d been first stationed in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, all those Yorkshire men sweating in the unfamiliar desert heat. Phil and Willie were envious of Ernie, who’d joined late but been sent straight into the fighting, but eventually the orders came that they were going to the Western Front after all.

Soon after he arrived in France, Dickon ceased to write at all.

The war went on. The wounded came in and left, for home or the front or the grave, and Mary told them about the garden, one after another, as much to remind herself as to comfort them, that there was a beautiful wick place waiting far away, until they were just words and she almost, almost didn’t believe there’d ever been a garden. But there was. There was, and it was waiting for her to come home.

## II. Peace, 1919

All that winter Mary drifted listlessly from room to room, or stared blankly at nothing until at length she realized that it had grown dark without her noticing. She slept entire days away, a deep dreamless sleep like falling out of existence, and woke dry-mouthed, muzzy-headed, emptied out; still tired, still numb.

Misselthwaite was quiet and cold. The gardeners and footmen who could return had done so, but there weren’t as many of them as there had been. Mr. Craven stayed shut up in his study, still smiled vaguely at nothing anyone else could see and looked straight through everyone else. They were all ghosts in the manor.

Only in Colin’s room the fire was kept built up high. “Has your father spoken to you at all since you came back?” Mary said.

A pause, in which Colin turned his grey eyes up to her. “He comes in to look at me when he thinks I’m asleep,” he said.

Mary let her face say what she thought of that.

Colin gave a one-shouldered shrug: resigned, already thinking about other things. He was doing something to a leg-shaped contraption of leather and steel—

“—aluminium, actually,” Colin said. “It’s lighter.”

The prosthetic was the best money could buy; it was poorly fitted, and still too heavy. He’d had something like a ballet barre set up in his room next to his bed, and he would hold on to it and walk back and forth—drag himself back and forth—with dogged determination, though it made him pant and sweat and curse under his breath just to go the length of the room.

“It will be good to be in the garden again,” he said through his teeth.

“Yes,” she said carefully; she thought anything had to be better than haunting the manor.

He frowned at her but didn’t say anything more; he was still focused on his laborious journey. At the far end of the barre was a big soft chair from which he could look out the window at the gardens when he was tired.

The gardens would be pleasant, Mary supposed. She didn’t know why he sat and stared out at them, though truth be told sometimes she found herself doing the same thing. It wasn’t going to bring his leg back.

Colin was too thin again, his bones too close under the skin. For months he’d had to use the hated wheelchair on the rare occasions he left his bed; now he had the choice of the leg, with which he couldn’t even go down the hall before he was shaking, or of crutches, which he also hated.

The scars on the stump of his leg were still livid red, though there was no longer any sign of the infection that had taken first his lower leg and then his knee. Dr. Craven had pronounced it healed some time ago and departed.

It still hurt him. He wouldn’t say it, but she caught him rubbing at it, and once she pushed his door open and saw him crying, silent hopeless tears, his head bent over his missing leg.

She crept away before he noticed her. He wasn’t the boy anymore she could shout at until he came out of his hysterics, and she had never learned to be comforting.

It was a cold grey spring in which it rained and rained until the cellars flooded, followed by a sweltering oppressive summer broken only by storms: thunder like the inescapable sound of guns and hail that stripped the leaves from the trees and crushed tender young plants trying to grow.

Mary went out one day and found Dickon at work among the blackberries, brutally cutting them down to the ground. The thorns had scratched him; his cheek was bleeding, and his arms above his heavy gloves.

“Nothin’ for it,” he said. “Left alone too long and they’ve gone wild—see, they’re choking the strawberries entire. ’S no good tryin’ t’ bring ‘em back in line.”

Fall came at last, and brought with it a cool breath of air. Dickon came inside to give his notice to Mr. Craven again. He stood, cap in his scarred hands, and looked across the desk at Mr. Craven and Mary standing next to him.

“I’m goin’ back to t’ France,” Dickon said.

## III. War, 1918

She woke quite certain that a woman had been singing, had called her name; the scent of flowers hung heavy in the air. There was a heavy fog which the moonlight turned into diffuse radiance, and the sound of shelling seemed only distant thunder presaging warm rain.

She got up, and put on her shoes, and went: like moving through a dream, hardly seeing where she walked, the world slipping away around her; and when the mist parted, instead of the hidden door of the garden she found herself at the edge of the wood.

It was a very old wood. Though the peasants who gathered firewood along its edges had disappeared and been replaced by men working for sawmills, still in its remote reaches ancient trees no one had ever seen grew trunks wider than a man is tall. Once knights had gone into its depths seeking the Grail or hunting a white stag, and one or two had even come out again; its grasping brambles and treacherous ravines had swallowed up more than one over-proud army, in days of old; and there was more than one skull still wearing a crown lost in the shadows beneath its branches.

Neither side had wished to contend with its terrain, and so it had stood largely unscathed for the first years of the war; but at last some faraway general squinting over his moustache at a map had decided that he would fling all the men that remained to him at the enemy, and this was where they must pass.

First came the artillery barrage: shrapnel, which cut deep gashes into bark and ripped away branches; high explosive shells, which tore up five hundred year oaks by the roots and blasted them to splinters, and into the rich black soil of generations carved craters deep enough to drown in; and poison gas, which not only burned and choked and blinded but settled into the soil, into the water that collected in the craters, and turned them to poison as well.

Then behind the rolling barrage came the men: running, crawling, catching upon the iron thorns of barbed wire, screaming; felled by machine gun fire or blown to bits by a shell, their bodies sinking into anonymous graves in the mud or falling into the craters where those yet living drowned and left behind them not the clean dry rot of the forest floor but a grotesque liquifying putrefaction.

It should have been—it was—foolish, hopeless, dangerous to walk into that blasted hellscape, but Mary had already been brought this far; and she thought she still heard a voice calling in the distance. She plunged in among the decapitated trunks still standing, guided by an unerring certainty, like a bird returning home: picking her unsteady way along, muddy to the knee and then the thigh, her hands bleeding where she’d fallen and caught herself, until at last she came to a gnarled old tree surrounded by bodies.

It took her a moment to see that the soldiers hadn’t merely happened to fall there in some small untold skirmish. Thick gnarled roots had grown around them and over them, holding them fast, strangling them; even as she watched, a man with a root thrust into his eye socket ceased to thrash and went still.

The wood was most certainly dying. But even dying it had the bitter strength of millennia, of the long consuming darkness beneath its branches. Silently it too had joined the battle: putting out roots to catch soldiers already stumbling with weariness and half-blind in their gas masks, dropping its doomed branches to trap them and leave jagged stumps to impale those unlucky enough to fall against them, covering with its leaves holes where the unwary might break an ankle and tumble into the muck. In that chaos of wood and shells and machine gun fire and barbed wire and mud whole companies—whole battalions were wiped out and the survivors banded together where they could, the men of a handful of companies led by a motley collection of young officers, and that was what must have happened here, because—

She found Dickon first. He lay on his back in a hollow at the base of the trunk, his eyes closed, his fingers gently curled, his face almost peaceful; his limbs bound round and round by thick roots. Near him—almost touching—was Colin, his mouth still open in a furious cry, his eyes staring, hand still reaching uselessly for his pistol.

Mary pulled at the roots binding them but her meager strength was no match for theirs; they held fast.

“Give them back,” she said, “give them back!” her voice rising into a scream.

Nothing. She snatched up a fallen bayonet and tried to saw at the roots, but the cuts closed as quickly as she made them. The moon had gone down, and she could only see in brief flashes by the light of shells exploding in the distance; the bayonet slipped in her hands and she groped frantically to make sure she hadn’t cut Colin instead. His face was cold, and she too was growing colder, shivering alone among the dead and dying.

At last a deep calm came over her. She laid her cheek against the trunk where it was weeping green sap through a great rent in its bark, and said in the soft coaxing voice she had learned for things that weren’t human but were nonetheless living, “Would you let them go? Just these two—you don’t really need them, do you?”

And perhaps the wood recognized something in her, something of the soil and the sun, or perhaps it only wondered at that quiet whisper, because something in that angry dying place turned its attention toward her.

It was unspeakably vast, unbearably so; it threatened to crush her. Mary closed her eyes and thought of the broken branch in the garden where Colin’s mother had died, and how the roses had grown up all over it.

“I’m sorry for what’s happened,” she murmured. “But they don’t want to hurt you. This is Dickon, he taught me about how to tell if a thing is a wick. The birds eat out of his hand and he sometimes he finds orphaned baby animals and then he raises them himself, just like their own mother. And this is Colin. He’s my cousin, and he used to be sick, but the garden made him well. He’s going to make scientific discoveries and make other people well too.”

But the wood cared not at all for humans or gardens, nor even for the small animals that were born and lived and died in a handful of seasons. It cared only for the many long years of growing to come, for the deep-buried acorns that would sprout and die drinking poisoned water and the others that would survive, twisted and bent though they might be; for the thousand, the hundred thousand years of rain and sun and leaf litter that would make the soil deep and rich enough for trees to stretch up straight and tall toward the sky again; and for that struggle it would take flesh and bone for fertilizer.

“No,” Mary said aloud, and pressed more closely still against the dying tree under her cheek, and went on murmuring—though at some point it might have become only remembering, only dreaming: Dickon showing her how to clear away the dry and dead wood in the garden, how to stir up the soil to let the air in so the roots could breathe; the two of them together clearing the weeds away so the little pale green points of crocuses and snowdrops, narcissuses and daffodils could poke their heads up to find the light in the spring. She gave it Colin sitting in the grass, his weak fingers trying to weed too, and growing stronger nearly as fast as the garden did; and she thought the wood stopped and began to listen.

It was vastly older and wilder and stronger than an English rose garden, and Mary was very small indeed before it.

She gave it the exultation of roses in the summer, the riot of colors and their heavy sweet perfume, and the drowsy buzz of a fat bumblebee in the heat of late afternoon. She gave it the sunlight slanting golden through the branches and the gentle melancholy of the leaves falling in autumn, and the deep peace and the quiet of the garden resting under its blanket of snow in the winter, waiting to wake again.

The wood took what she had to give it and swallowed it up. But it was not yet convinced.

She was desperate, now; there were tears mixing with the sap running down her face. She poured into the wood not just the memory of the garden but everything it had given her: the robin, her very first friend, and a refuge, a place where she could be alone but not lonely; her own body changing from skinny and sallow to strong and healthy.

She dragged them up from the depths of her heart like cutting down a plant, like digging up its roots: running and laughing until she couldn’t breathe, and the air bright in her lungs; something for her to do, something that wanted her work and her care, and gave it back a hundredfold in flowers; until she came to the last deep-buried root: that first silver glimpse of the secret garden through the mist like a new world opening up before her, the first glimmer that there was something to hope for beyond interminable days in a house of empty halls and closed doors where no one wanted or remembered her.

It passed from her. She fell back with nothing left, with no memory of spring left in her heart. The wood gave a trembling sigh—

—and let them go.

Dimly afterward she remembered one of them supporting her. They must have limped back together to the support trenches; what they said to explain her presence she didn’t know, but she was bundled onto a train and sent back to the camp, where she stood dully while the head nurse bawled her out for missing her shift and then put her right back on duty.

She was numb; it felt as though she had always been here, in the ward where men were brought grievously wounded and left when they died, and she always would be. When the news of the armistice came she only stopped, said, “Oh,” and then went on bandaging the gangrenous foot she’d been working on. She didn’t know why she was crying.

## IV. Peace, 1920

“I shall go mad,” Colin said calmly instead of a greeting when he saw Mary there in the doorway, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “The leg that isn’t there itches. It itches until I think I shall do something quite barbaric.” 

Mary was beginning to feel restless again; she’d come to see if Colin wanted to take a break from his books. It was all very well for him, who had studies to catch up on before he returned to Oxford, but she was rather at loose ends; she couldn’t seem to remember how she’d passed the days before the war.

“Here, I have an idea,” she said. “Put your legs up on the couch.”

“Mary,” Colin said in warning tones, but did as she said: the real one on the right, the too-heavy false one on the left.

She fetched a blanket from his closet and spread it over him. “Look, there’s your leg, right there—”

“Mary.”

“—right there. Doesn’t it look just like a leg? Close your eyes and imagine you have two legs. Now scratch it.”

“Mary—”

“Scratch it,” Mary said, in the voice she’d learned to manage soldiers in pain who were not inclined to listen to a slip of a girl half their size. He finally shut his mouth and did it, and after a moment his shoulders lost their tension and he sighed.

“See? I knew it would work,” Mary said, though she’d known no such thing.

“Magic,” Colin said, his mouth twisting wryly. A little while after that he got up—he could stand for nearly half an hour now, though it tired him—and they went together into the gardens.

That summer Mary and Colin took the train to the coast, and then a ferry across the Channel, and then another train, and then they hired a car that took them down a winding road at the end of which loomed a forbidding stone fortress; but Dickon met them outside and swung down smiling from the seat of a wagon drawn by two stolid horses.

“You’re just in th’ nick o’ time,” he said. “We’re just settin’ out. This is Armand,” he added. The man still sitting on the wagon nodded and touched his cap.

In the village Mary and Colin had passed through on their way in, they stopped outside a wrecked house with a half-dozen shells stacked neatly by the road.

“We go ‘round an’ collect ‘em,” Dickon said. Armand waved and called something to the thin woman with a baby on her hip who came out of the cellar to watch them. Another curly-headed child peeked out from behind her leg.

“Some is buried deep an’ they work their way up,” Dickon said. “But there’s a terrible lot just lyin’ about. ’S good when they leaves ‘em for us—sometimes they tries to strip th’ copper off t’ sell an’ then—” He shook his head.

There were several more stops like that one: more destroyed houses, some of them starting to be rebuilt, and fields with farmers at work in the distance. Dickon carried shells with the quiet calm assurance he’d used on baby animals; he wrapped them carefully in blankets and set them in the wagon as gently as he would’ve a sleeping lamb.

They continued on the road until they passed a sign that read:

ZONE ROUGE

ENTREE INTERDITE

Armand, the reins loose in his hand, took no notice; and then the road took a bend around a hill and they came, with startling suddenness, upon the battlefield.

Dickon stopped the wagon at the edge and climbed down; the horses stood placidly.

Mary climbed down too. She’d seen—not this place, but one very like it—only once, on a foggy night half-remembered and lit only by shells bursting overhead. Now, no longer wreathed in smoke and gas, the landscape was revealed: the deep gashes of trenches cut into the earth, only a hundred yards apart—only a hundred yards apart!—and between them the pockmarked wasteland of craters and rusting barbed wire that had claimed so many.

But now the trenches, no longer constantly shored up by men digging for their lives, were crumbling inward, and the deep craters too, washed by snow and rain, were beginning to soften at the edges. There were a few sprigs of grass starting to sprout, here and there.

Dickon and Armand were working, digging carefully around unexploded shells half-buried in the ground. Colin, still on the wagon, tried to help steady them as they were loaded up.

Mary, faintly annoyed with herself for being a little nervous about it, came back over to see Dickon kneel and touch something on the ground—the end of a bone—a femur, she thought. Dickon marked it with a flag on a stake; and now that she knew what it was, she could see several dozen others fluttering all around them.

“Th’ burial parties’ll come for ’im,” Dickon said.

“Good,” Colin said firmly; he’d been very quiet.

When the wagon was full, which didn’t take long, they turned around and went back—more slowly than they’d come, and with more care to avoid ruts and potholes.

“Do they ever…?” Mary started.

Dickon shared a glance with Armand. “Sometimes,” Dickon said. “Not too often.”

In the courtyard of the fortress Armand nudged Dickon, who pointed out his little vegetable garden which helped supply the mess hall; and then they set about unloading the wagon.

Most of the fort was actually underground. They carried the shells through a stone archway and down a spiraling tunnel. At one point they passed through a central room wide open to the sky, which apparently had been the fort’s magazine until an unlucky shell found it and ignited the stores of gunpowder and explosives.

“Boom,” Armand said, gesturing with his hands and nodding wisely.

The storeroom they finally stopped at was already stacked high with shells like firewood.

“All th’ rooms we passed is full already,” Dickon said. He explained that they would be transported elsewhere and destroyed, about which Colin, though by now rather drooping despite his ferocious determination not to show it, had any number of questions—

“—how long will it take to finish?” Colin asked.

Dickon said something to Armand in his rough Yorkshire-accented French, listened to the answer, then turned to Colin and said, “Who knows? A hundred years—”

—which carried them all the way to dinner.

There were perhaps forty démineurs altogether, quiet and tired, most of them, eating at long tables in the cavernous mess hall. Dickon, too, talked more slowly than before, and was less quick to smile. Mary looked at his familiar beloved face, and thought: he could have—would have—lived all his life in Yorkshire, between the moor and the bright blue sky, and been happy. But fate—circumstance—the grinding gears of hostility and alliance—intervened, and—

—a tree once uprooted and transplanted will never be as strong as it might have been, no matter how long it lives; and often that is not long. But still, when it feels the sun and the rain it carefully stretches out its crippled roots into foreign soil and, sometimes, finds a hold.

So Mary watched Dickon and the way his face cracked into a grin at another man—Pascal—who clapped him on the back and sat down next to him, and leaned her shoulder against Colin’s, and smiled a little to herself.

She had never seen this place as it had been, and she never would; but there were so many, the démineurs here and the townsfolk rebuilding and the farmers plowing their abandoned fields together doing the long slow work of making the land fit for life again. And there would be work for her too at home; and even if all of them grew tired—weren’t enough—couldn’t fix what they’d broken—this year in no man’s land there was grass, and next year there would be saplings: just a few at first, stretching up toward the light, then more and more; and then small animals, mice and rabbits and birds, and then the foxes and the deer, like flowers blooming in a garden long abandoned. The truth is, spring comes at last whether you will or no.

* * *

* * *

The Département du Déminage estimates that it will be another seven hundred years before the last shells are gone. From the air the scars of trenches and shell craters can still be clearly seen, as easily traced as lines on a general’s map; in places the shells still lie so thick on the ground that one cannot walk across it, and the soil is still so thick with lead and mercury and chlorine and arsenic that nothing will grow.

Every year farmers plow their fields and pile up the shells they find by the road—and a few of them are killed, and the rest go on with the business of feeding France. The forests are back, and every year they grow a little more.


End file.
